The Internet, the availability of broadband access to access the Internet, the ease with which content and information can be created and communicated, and the phenomenon associated with organizing in social networks to communicate over the Internet has transformed the world.
These technologies permit the sharing of ideas and the automation of manual processes beyond what anyone could have foreseen or comprehended just a few decades ago. The exponential pace with which economies and lives are evolving is staggering.
Moreover, once an individual is connected to the Internet and participating in that world community that individual is on equal footing with world leaders or the most powerful CEO's of multinational corporations. Such an individual may be odd or a social outcast, but with the power of the Internet and social networking the proclivities of that individual can be matched with others across the globe to form their own community to share and express similar ideas or concerns. Of course not all communities or individuals have noble or altruistic intents; so, along with the good that such technologies bring so comes the not so good. That is, terrorists and criminals alike can also use these forums for achieving inhumane and dangerous ends.
One continuing problem associated with content gathering, information collection, and social networking are that to a large extent individuals, governments, and enterprises have to manually seek and identify desired content and attempt to link it together for further inspection and mining. That is, there are few automated mechanisms that permit desired content to be automatically culled and linked in manners desired by users.
In fact, often a user can become inundated and desensitized by the abundance of information available on the Internet. Furthermore, one never knows whether content or information is truly reliable. All too often content can be a hoax or the identity of an author feigned to purposes of drawing in unsuspecting users to a cause or a scam. So even if a user can find desired content that user is still never really sure it is reliable and trustworthy content.
Thus what are needed are improved techniques for reliably identifying and linking related or desired content together.